Miscellaneous Information

MY ROLE

I joined TIG in October 2016, to work on the ERC Starting Grant "Building Next-Generation Computational Tools for High Resolution Neuroimaging Studies" recently awarded to Dr Eugenio Iglesias.

My main task for the project is to develop automated or semi-automated methods for the segmentation and reconstruction of brain histological data, by taking advantage of heterogeneous sources of information (e.g., existing low-resolution probabilistic atlases, manual segmentation, MRI scans). These techniques will be used to recover the 3D structure of histology samples from a number of cases (i.e. brains) provided by the UCL Brain Bank. The resulting reconstructed data will be used to build high-resolution computational atlases in later stages of the ERC project.

My host institution was the School of Science and Engineering (Computing), University of Dundee (UK), where I was advised by Prof. Emanuele Trucco.

My 3-year PhD project was about leveraging modelling and machine learning for the analysis of curvilinear structures in medical images. This work was done in collaboration with clinical partners at Harvard Medical School and Tufts Medical Center (Boston, USA).

The technical challenge was to design and develop fully automated algorithms to quantify specific morphometric properties of the curvilinear structures in order to: (1) allow the analysis of large volumes of image data with cost-effective solutions; (2) provide objective measurements for potentially highly subjective ones (e.g., tortuosity). This work has resulted in several technical, clinical publications and a framework which is currently used to quantify the tortuosity of thousands of corneal nerve images with the aim of identifying new links with specific pathologies.

I hold a 3-year Bsc in Telecommunication Engineering (thesis on Image Processing) and a 2-year MSc in Electronics and Telecommunication (thesis on Medical Image Analysis) both obtained from the University of Siena (Italy) in 2010 and 2012, respectively.

To find out more about me, you can have a look at my personal website -> here.